PayPal Continues to Illustrate Why Bitcoin Has Value

Voat's frozen PayPal account demonstrates the problem endures. Voat operates as a Reddit alternative, hosting content that mainstream platforms censor. The site restricts removal to illegal material. As traffic grew, PayPal suspended the donation account. The company said it violated its policy: "Under the Acceptable Use Policy, PayPal may not be used to send or receive payments for certain sexually oriented materials or services or items that could be considered obscene."

Atif Colo, who built Voat, rejected this claim. "It's wrong and false on so many levels," he said. "I didn't know what I expected when I trusted PayPal with our donation money."

When you create a Bitcoin transaction, you send nothing more than a cryptographically signed message across a network. Without intermediaries, you can fund causes others oppose. One person might block donations to Hillary Clinton. Another might target Rand Paul. PayPal would have stopped Wikileaks contributors in 2011 if Bitcoin hadn't provided an alternative.

To censor anything, you need gatekeepers. Someone decides what disappears. Once you allow that, gatekeepers silence innocent organizations alongside guilty ones. PayPal terminated Kim Dotcom's Mega, a cloud storage service. You might dislike who gets to speak in an open system. That's how open systems work. Bitcoin applies the same principle to money transfer.